With the Student Health Centre no longer providing medical excuse notes for students who miss required term work, colleges and instructors are being encouraged to review the necessity of such notes and to consider using self-declaration of absence forms as an alternative.

Lynn Kuffner, manager of Student Health and Counselling, said health centre physicians typically issue about 2,000 excuse notes per year, most around exam time and most to students not under ongoing care at the centre. The demand for excuse notes consumes an enormous amount of physician time that should be dedicated to medical care, she said, and it is very difficult for physicians to verify an illness in a single visit or “determine how incapacitated the student is.”

During exam times, Kuffner said it is not uncommon for the centre’s walk-in schedule to be filled by students requesting excuse notes “and we’re turning people away who need medical care. It’s not good use of physicians’ time” to be dealing with complaints like headache, stomachache, colds or flu which can generally be self-managed at home.

The alternative is the student-signed statutory declaration of absence form first developed last year during the H1N1 influenza pandemic. David Hannah, associate vice-president of student and enrolment services, said the form worked well during that period when the university was trying to avoid students with the flu flocking to the health centre and potentially infecting others. The form requires students to state the reason for missing term work and then verify that reason with their signature.

In the absence of a university-wide policy regarding medical excuse notes, Hannah said there is “a patchwork of practices that are all over the map,” and requiring a student to produce a note “is antithetical to the educational goal of behaving ethically and taking responsibility for your actions. We have to trust the students – if they say they’re sick, they’re sick” but he pointed out that falsifying a signed declaration form is considered academic dishonesty.

With the Student Health Centre no longer issuing notes, students who are required to produce documentation of illness may have to go off campus to physicians who generally charge $20-40 per note.

Hannah said the requirement for medical excuse notes has been a point of discussion among assistant and associate academic deans for some time, and many universities that first used a student self-declaration form last year to address H1N1 are adopting it as standard practice. The University of Alberta recently instituted a policy requiring a statutory declaration of absence that states students cannot be asked to produce medical documentation. Similar polices are in effect at UBC Okanagan, McMaster and in some faculties at the University of Toronto.